AN NCS PREMIERE: FORMLESS OEDON — “CALCINE PURIFICATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 212023
 

Like other bands around the globe, Formless Oedon from the Philippines came to life in time to release their first recording (the Deathless Luminosity EP) just as the world began to be consumed by the ravages of covid in March 2020. Fortunately, the EP still made an impression among fans of death metal, and particularly those with a hungering for the old-school filth of the Finnish tradition.

Even more fortunately, the pandemic and its lockdowns didn’t snuff out the creative fires of this band, and they managed to record a debut album named Streams of Rot that’s now set for release on July 24th by the Memento Mori label. As a sign of what’s coming, today we premiere the album’s second advance track, “Calcine Purification“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASCENDENCY — “VICTORY – IN ALL ITS EPHEMERAL GLORY”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 212023
 

In July of 2020 the Danish band Ascendency released a debut EP named Birth of an Eternal Empire. It chronicled the rise to power of a despotic tyrant and was announced as “the first of a trilogy of short releases, with a continuous conceptual narrative, about the thirst for power and hegemony and the ultimate betrayal of ego and arrogance”.

That EP made a striking impression as a hybrid of death and black metal that featured skull-busting grooves, white-hot riffing, crazed leads, demonic vocals, and yet the capacity to create eerie and unsettling atmospherics from the other side of the veil rent by the music’s violence.

Now Ascendency are returning with another EP in the promised sequence. This one, A Manifest of Imperious Destiny, will be co-released on July 14th by none other than Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Dark Descent Records, on 12″ vinyl and CD formats, respectively, and today we have the privilege of revealing one of the four new tracks: “Victory – in all its Ephemeral Glory“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLUDGE KEEPER — “WEED INCUBATOR”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 202023
 

From the name chosen by Andrea Tocchetto (of Inverted Matter) for his solo project Sludge Keeper you might be expecting, well, sludge metal. From the name chosen for the song “Weed Incubator” that we’re about to premiere you might expect, well, something weedian and woozy.

But take a close look at Mark Erskine‘s cover art for Sludge Keeper‘s forthcoming debut album Slough Of Despair and you’ll begin to understand the error of any such assumptions. Pay particular attention to the fiery maw that has opened up from the bowels of the earth, the ruined arches, and in particular the enormous toothsome horror that looms above it all.

These features point the way to music that’s supernaturally monstrous, frightening, and fueled by hellfire — and all those signs are a lot closer to the mark of the music, which is anything but weedian and woozy.

What you’re about to encounter instead is death metal of terrific ferocity — dire and devastating in its moods and exhilarating in its execution. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DÉMONOS — “YOUR ASCENSION IS A MERE ILLUSION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 202023
 

At the end of April this year the Indian black metal band Démonos released their astounding debut album Anno Daemonium. Over the space of two consecutive Shades of Black columns we attempted to review it, in stages that aligned with the unfolding of the album’s tracks. Experiencing it that way created increasing surprises that were difficult to sum up. The path through the album is not a straight and narrow one. As we wrote in the second phase of the review:

“That trip sometimes feels like being caged with a feral beast and no way out. At other times it feels like someone slipped acid under your tongue without your knowing until it kicked in. At still other times, you might feel teleported into a burial ground as a piano plays a hopeless lament, with the wails of mourners in the background, or into a sonic aurora borealis that glitters and drifts in wondrous colors while the bass throbs.”

And all that happens in just the second song, “Vesper Evocation“, which further includes the solemn tones of a church organ at the end.

We spent several substantial paragraphs here attempting to describe the experience of the three-part opening track “Magma Stigmata“, and there are still five more to come after those two. With each one, Démonos manages to bring in something you haven’t heard in the preceding tracks, both vocally and instrumentally, and in their moods. In other words, there are surprises galore, some of them like sorcery, some of them frightening, some of them spellbinding, some of them ugly, none of them dull.

Today we have the chance to further highlight the album’s third song, “Your Ascension is a Mere Illusion“, thanks to a fascinating video for it that we’re now premiering. The song itself is fascinating, in both its inspiration and its effects on the listener. Here is what Démonos says about its subject: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ETERNAL ROT — “SWOLLEN CORPSE ADORATION”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jun 192023
 

When you gaze upon Mark Riddick‘s cover art for the new album by Eternal Rot, you know what’s coming. You know that little cross will provide no defense against the rotting horrors that have crawled from their graves to extract a ghastly vengeance. You also know, even if you haven’t previously encountered this band’s music, that their brand of death metal is murder most foul — diseased, disgusting, and depraved — but it’s also the kind of “ignorant, knuckle-dragging stomp” that’s calculated to crush skulls and wreck necks.

Those quoted words aren’t ours — they’re part of the PR previews offered on behalf of the two labels who will jointly release this band’s third album, Moribound, on July 24th — Memento Mori and Godz Ov War Productions. But don’t mistake those words as some kind of criticism. It’s just a way of highlighting the fact that Eternal Rot disdain pretension and favor the primitive — but we must quickly add that their rotten and ruinous brand of organ-rupturing and bone-smashing extremity is as catchy as it is bludgeoning.

As you can see from the title of the song we’re premiering today, Eternal Rot also have a way with words, the kind that brings devilish smiles to fiendish faces. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ORNAMENTOS DEL MIEDO — “EL CAMINO DESAPARECE A CADA PASO”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 192023
 

The creative output of the Spanish funeral doom band Ornamentos del Miedo (“ornaments of fear”) has rolled forward like a powerful tide, seemingly unstoppable in its momentum. After a first single in 2018, this solo project of Ángel Chicote (Graveyard of Souls, Mass Burial, Logical End…) has produced three albums and a pair of shorter releases, most recently the EP Frío, which was released by The Way of the Hermit in January of this year. And now a fourth full-length is about to crash against the rocks of our shores.

The title of the new album is El Cosmos me Observa en Silencio. Presenting six songs and more than 70 minutes of music in total, it’s set for release on July 6th by the same label, which is an imprint of the Spanish label Darkwoods that’s solely devoted to gloomy and mournful musical atmospheres.

To help pave the way toward the release of this immense new descent into an underworld of dark emotions, today we premiere a lyric video for the 5th track in the album’s running order, a song called “El Camino Desaparece a cada Paso” (“The Path Disappears at Every Step”). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SNORLAX — “THE NECROTROPHIC ABYSS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jun 162023
 

It’s not as if we didn’t already know that the Australian project Snorlax (the solo work of Brendan Auld) was capable of making music that causes listeners stop suddenly in their racing tracks, and leaves them feeling kind of gob-smacked. Especially on the band’s debut album II, that became vividly evident. But still, the band’s new album The Necrotrophic Abyss is astonishing, and we’re lucky to get to premiere it today.

Here, the band’s evolving unification of black and death metal has reached full fruition, flowering into compositions that are bludgeoning, violent, and bewildering, elaborate in their constant permutations but both viscerally frightening and soul-crushing in their renditions of desperation and downfall — and all of it executed with jaw-dropping technical skill and captured with remarkable production quality.

On this album, to put it more succinctly, the unexpected becomes expected, and the result is a compact record that stands well out from the pack as we near the halfway point of 2023. It’s not the kind of thing you hear once and move on from. It’s the kind of thing that’s like your own personal Pandora’s box, waiting to be opened again and again, to witness with stark fascination its manifold evils fly into the world over and over. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PLAGUEWIELDER — “BURNING DEATH”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jun 152023
 

We’ve closely followed the releases of Ohio’s Plaguewielder almost from the band’s inception, not only for the obvious reason that we’ve found the music consistently compelling but also because the progression from one release to the next has never been entirely predictable.

To be sure, dark shadows have consistently swathed the music, and it has been continuously fueled by harrowing emotional intensity. As we observed in reviewing their most recent album, the remarkable Covenant Death, “feelings of hopelessness, frustration, and fury have always seem to be fighting to get out into the songs”.

But, especially as revealed on that latest album, the band’s stylistic ingredients have become increasingly multi-faceted. That album was still music as catharsis, as Plaguewielder‘s music always has been, but the range of musical influences expanded outward in captivating ways.

We’ve learned that Plaguewielder are at work on their next album, which will have the evocative title In Dust and Ash, and we will again be eager (and intrigued) to hear it. But in the meantime Plaguewielder are bridging the gap between full-lengths with a new EP named Burning Death (set for release tomorrow via Jeff Wilson‘s disorder-recordings), and once again it holds surprises. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERPENS LVX — “I AM THE ADVERSARY (IMPII IRRELIGIOSI CARNIVORIBUS IMMORTALIBUS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 152023
 

Spirituality is a staple of black metal, more than in any other genre of extreme metal. Although some death metal bands seem to have made a religion out of gore, and there’s no shortage of pentagrams and blood sacrifices in the classics of doom, not to mention the worship of Lovecraft just about everywhere, it is in the realms of the pitch black where supernatural belief dominates.

The exaltation of Nature is its own form of worship among many black metal bands, but there is only one figure at the very top of the pantheon. In different guises and explored through a multitude of different esoteric manifests and practices, it is Lucifer (though his names are legion) who provides the principal inspiration, or at least that is what many bands proclaim, though one suspects it is faux faith in many instances.

Serpens Lvx brandish Satanism lavishly on their debut album, extensively entitled HENDECAGRAMICON: Adversarial Ethos Exoterically Unlocking Shrines Of Dissolution, though their thematic subject matter extends to mythic demonic figures of greater variety: The song titles, for example, include references to Tiamat, Typhon, Quetzalcoatl, and Aztec vampyrism. It is a variant metaphysics — the album also includes a song called “Anticosmic Eroticism (Sexual Black Light Magick)” — but the through-lines are apparent.

The important question, of course, is how this part-Mexican, part-Russian duo have elucidated their themes in sound. We have examples for you, including a song we’re premiering today: “I Am The Adversary (Impii Irreligiosi Carnivoribus Immortalibus)“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries